Page 83 of Psycho Obsession
The door chirps. Access Granted.
The room inside isn’t a vault for money. It’s a server farm. Rows of black towers humming with a low, electric hive-mind energy. But in the centre of the room, on a glass pedestal, sits a single, ancient-looking leather folder.
Ryker picks it up. He flips it open, his eyes scanning the pages. I watch his face—the way his jaw tightens, the way the colour drains from his lips until he looks like a marble statue.
“Ryker?” Jex asks, his hand tightening on his rifle. “What is it? More names?”
“No,” Ryker says, his voice a ghost of a sound. He turns the folder toward us.
It’s a birth certificate. Three of them.
But they aren’t ours. Not exactly. They’re dated twenty years before we were born. And at the bottom, in the signature line for the ‘Chief Medical Officer,’ is a name that makes the world tilt on its axis.
Dr. Hallow Maddix.
“Mother,” I whisper, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. “But she died. Dad said she died during the ‘complications’ with my birth.”
“She didn’t die,” Ryker says, his voice trembling with a cold, murderous realisation. He flips to the next page—a blueprint. It isn’t for Oakhaven. It’s a map of a dozen facilities across the globe. Paris. Tokyo. New York. “She didn’t die, Hallow. She promoted herself.”
Underneath the map is a recent photograph. It’s a woman standing in a high-tech lab, her hair a sharp, silver bob, her eyes the exact same icy blue as Ryker’s. She’s looking at a monitor, and on that monitor is a live feed.
It’s a feed of this room. Right now.
A speaker in the ceiling crackles to life, a sharp, burst of static that makes Jex spin around, his weapon raised.
“Hello, children,” a voice says. It’s smooth, melodic, and completely devoid of warmth—the sound of a mother who tucks you in with a scalpel. “I must say, the ballroom was a bit much, but the aesthetics were undeniable. You’ve always had your father’s flair for the dramatic.”
I sink to my knees, the white floor feeling like ice against my skin. “Mother?”
“Don’t call me that, Hallow,” the voice purrs. “You’re a prototype. And prototypes don’t get to address the Creator so familiarly. Jex, Ryker… thank you for bringing her home. The harvest is scheduled for dawn. Don’t be late.”
The monitors in the room suddenly flicker to life, showing the harbour. The black helicopters I saw in mynightmares aren’t coming to save the city. They’re coming for us.
And on the screen, a red light begins to blink on a schematic of Hallow’s brain.
Signal Active.
Ryker looks at the screen, then at me, his eyes wide with a devastating, silent horror. “Hallow… what did they put in you?”
Ryker’s fingers are white where they grip the edges of the leather folder, the paper crinkling under the sheer force of his tremor. He isn’t looking at the blueprints anymore. He’s staring at the monitor, at the pulsing crimson dot superimposed over the skeletal wireframe of my skull.
It’s rhythmic. A heartbeat of light. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“It’s in the sub-occipital nerve cluster,” Ryker whispers, his voice sounding like it’s being dragged over broken glass. He reaches out, his hand hovering inches from the back of my head, not daring to touch me. “The surgery… the one they said was to ‘fix the damage’ after the first auction. They didn’t fix anything. They wired you, Hallow. You’re a biological transmitter.”
Jex makes a sound—a low, animalistic growl that vibrates in his chest. He stalks toward the server racks, his rifle swinging wildlyas he looks for something, anything, to destroy. “You’re saying she’s been calling them? This whole time? Every time we touched her, every time we moved her… she was screaming our coordinates to that woman?”
“She didn’t know, Jex!” Ryker roars, spinning around. The desperation in his eyes is a jagged thing, cutting through the cold mask he usually wears. “Look at her! Does she look like she’s in on the joke?”
I can’t breathe. The air in the vault has turned to lead. I reach up, my fingers trembling as they find the small, jagged scar at the base of my hairline. I’ve felt it a thousand times—a small, hard knot I thought was just a reminder of a bad night. Now, it feels like a parasite. It feels like a hot needle driven into my soul.
“Is she watching me now?” I whisper, my voice barely audible over the hum of the cooling fans. “Through my eyes? Is she feeling my heart break?”
The speaker crackles again. That voice—smooth, cultured, and utterly predatory—returns with a soft, patronising chuckle.
“Don’t be so dramatic, Hallow,” Mother says. I can hear the smile in her words, the kind of smile that accompanies a lethal injection. “The visual feed is offline for now. The bandwidth is being used for the bio-metric sync. I’m currently watching your cortisol levels spike. You’re terrified, darling. It’s making the data very… vibrant.”
Jex slams the butt of his rifle into a server tower, the plastic shattering, sparks showering his boots. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
